Case Study: Financial Content SEO @ Funding Circle

Kirill Sajaev

SEO & Founder

 ·  2 min read

Table of contents

Project Summary

Funding Circle is a lender that specializes in underwriting business loans. Funding Circle has multiple international divisions that operate separately and AUQ partnered with their USA office to create time sensitive, financial content during the Covid pandemic.

The Challenge

The challenge was that we were working on creating guidelines for PPP loans. These loans were limited to a short window during the pandemic, which meant that our content needed to rank quickly to be useful for our readers and for the business, as well as accurate and educational.

The Process

  1. Discovery Phase – we worked with Funding Circle to understand their team, their clients and their goals for this engagement.
  2. Analytics Set Up – work with Funding Circle’s analytics team to set up tracking for the goals that we’ll be evaluated on. While we focus on traffic growth, we want to make sure that this traffic converts to leads, and that is what we report on.
  3. Keyword Clusters & Content Research – we analyze search patterns to recommend possible keywords, then we organize these keywords / article pairs into topical content clusters.
  4. Publication & Optimization – Once content production begins, we regularly check back on older articles and optimize based on ranking changes. It’s crucial to review older content as these are often the easiest articles to bump to the first page.

To deliver the content we’ve partnered with experienced authors in the financial space, this ensures that Funding Circle’s articles are accurate and don’t require much editing from the internal teams.

To complement the newly created content we’ve also worked on optimizing the article templates on the blog. We highly recommend focusing on design elements that help improve the user experience and perceived authority of the blog. We find design elements like table of contents, author bios, and conversion banners a crucial part of design seo.

The Results

We successfully ranked multiple relevant PPP articles on the first page before the program ended, helping drive tens of thousands of visits to Funding Circle in the process, and hundreds of PPP applications.

We worked together at the height of covid between January 2021 – August 2021 to educate users on Funding Circle’s PPP services.

This chart shows the long lasting impact our work had on the Funding Circle Resource Center.

Currently Funding Circle ranks for 1,800 PPP related keywords on the first page. You can see a small snippet of them here.

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